The Girl of Ink & Stars

APPLE BOOKS REVIEW

From the author: “In a really cynical way, I just wanted to see if I could write a book, because my two best friends on the course on the Oxford Creative Writing course I did had just finished their first drafts. Because I was a poet, my husband joked that I’d get bored writing a novel. So I sat down and thought, ‘What is going to keep me interested through the length of this?’ A couple of weeks earlier, I’d written a piece of writing about a girl running away through a forest. And she stayed with me. I decided that her name was Isabella and sat down with her almost to have a conversation. ‘What are you running from? What came before? What comes after?’ At that stage, I didn’t know this would be a children’s book, and my touchstone texts for it were crazy—from Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights to One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez and Cormac McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy. I wanted this novel to have scope and a journey, so I drew an island with a river running from the centre out to sea and some forests. I labelled two points on the map, one was Gromera and the other was Carment. I decided Isabella would have to go from one to the other. I didn’t know why, but I just put myself in her body and started to write, following her through this landscape. I never set out to write a book about colonialism or female power and female friendship, but they just came very naturally.”